Minami Alps Onsen Iida

Minami Alps Onsen Iida is a thermal bathing facility in Iida City in the southern Ina Valley of Nagano Prefecture, a city renowned as Japan's apple-producing heartland where extensive orchard terraces on the valley slopes produce some of the country's finest fruit, and as the southern gateway to the Minami Alps, the dramatic range of 3,000-meter peaks including Kita-dake — Japan's second-highest mountain — that rises abruptly from the eastern edge of the Ina Valley in a wall of alpine grandeur visible from the city. Iida is also famous as the birthplace and national center of the Kabuki puppet theater tradition known as Imozuru Kikiuchi Daikagura, and the city preserves one of Japan's finest collections of traditional neighborhood-based Kabuki theater groups, the za, who perform in elaborate local festivals that keep alive a theatrical tradition unique to the southern Shinano cultural zone. The sodium-bicarbonate thermal waters here warm visitors to a city of extraordinary cultural richness and alpine beauty, where Japan's second-highest peak, remarkable folk theater traditions, and world-class apple orchards create an unusually complete and locally grounded destination in the southern Japanese Alps.